261) Day 29 -- Reason #29 to revolt against Predatory Capitalism: Manufacturing Consent, Part 1: Skibidi toilet and a submarine implosion

Remember the 5 people who died in the submarine a few years ago? You know, the ones who were on an adventure/tourist cruise, exploring the Titanic?  You know, the ones who were risking their lives in equipment that was intentionally designed to take short-cuts around safety protocols?  You know, the ones who damn near everybody was OBSESSED with for the several days in which the world marshalled millions of dollars of resources trying to rescue?  When every TV screen in every lobby, subway platform, doctor’s office, bar, pub, restaurant and most living rooms was showcasing this story, non-stop, day after day after day?

Remember them?

Now, ask yourself this horrible-sounding question — Why the fuck did we care?

Your first reaction is likely “Because it was a tragedy!! What a heartless question!!” 

But was it a tragedy?  I mean, sure, it was a tragedy, by definition, because 5 humans lost their lives, doing something entirely voluntary in which they decided to risk their lives for a joy-ride.  But still, yes, 5 people lost their lives.  That’s a 5-person-sized tragedy.

Have 5 people lost their lives over anything else recently?

I mean, Gaza comes to mind.  More than 20-submarines worth of Palestinians have died in Gaza SINCE THE CEASEFIRE.  Are we giving them 20 times the media coverage and international obsession, than the 5 people on the sub?

More than 9300 submarines worth of Palestinians died during the Israeli genocide.  How many people spent as much time learning about Gaza’s almost-80 years of imprisonment by an occupying Army, and subsequent military slaughter by that same occupying Army, as they did in becoming submarine-safety-experts?  

Donald Trump’s COVID mismanagement is directly responsible for about 400 000 people dying unnecessarily from COVID during his time in office.  That’s 80 000 submarine tragedies.  How much did the average person learn about exactly what Trump did wrong?  And why so many people died?  Did they spend more time on that, or more time on becoming submarine-safety-experts?

Tesla’s “autonomous driving” feature has directly killed at least 14 people.  That’s 2.8 submarine tragedies.  How much does that average person know about Tesla’s technology? Or the safety protocols they are supposed to follow?  Or the lawsuits against the company for not following those safety protocols?  Or the disinformation spread by Elon Musk about his product’s safety?  Or about how Elon’s new position as head of DOGE and Trump’s right-hand man, will nullify most and probably all of the investigations into his companies?  Including SpaceX, which just had a spectacular rocket explosion, while under investigation for …yep, not following safety protocols.  Note: Elon called the fiery explosion a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”  In other words, it fucking blew up in the sky, but “rapid unscheduled disassembly” doesn’t sound as bad.

The point is, there are submarine-sized tragedies happening all the time.  A lot of them, if we truly focused on them, learned about them, and tried to make sure they don’t happen again, would lead to deep, profound, scathing critiques of the power hierarchy that rules our society.  Guess who doesn’t want that to happen?

Whereas others of them, like 5 guys on a joyride in a sub, can be focused on ad nauseam, 24/7, and are more like “entertainment”, like rubbernecking a highway crash, or disaster porn, and no matter how much you learn about them and get concerned about “submarine safety” or whatever, it won’t lead to any real critique of the system.  It won’t lead to anybody questioning the way society is organized.  It won’t lead to any sort of revolutionary awakening.  It’ll just give people something to talk about for a while, to sit at home and feel jolts of adrenaline while they watch a screen, and to feel superior and intelligent dispensing their newly-acquired knowledge of submarine technology on social media.

Guess who DOES want that to happen?  It’s pretty handy for “the power hierarchy” if we spend all our time worrying about shit that doesn’t threaten them, rather than, you know, learning about the power hierarchy, and organizing against it.

* * * * *

In Alex Huxley’s presciently brilliant dystopian prediction, Brave New World, the population was placated with a pervasive, readily-available, socially normative drug — soma.  The constant ingestion of soma kept people from ever really FEELING just how fucked their society was.  Replacing traditional opium-of-the-masses institutions like the Church, soma was a way of escaping responsibility for, and even awareness of, one’s shitty circumstances.  

“A gramme is better than a damn” was one slogan. 

Why care?  Why feel rage?  Why do the hard work of opening your mind to the complex truth of oppression that you and everyone else lives in?  Just take some soma, maaaan.

It’s not much of a stretch for people to realize that much of our entertainment industry, sports, meme culture, video games, fancy new gadgets, social media and other aspects of our instant gratification society, are “soma”, lulling us into complacency so that we have something relatively trivial to engage our minds, something relatively trivial to care about, something relatively trivial to focus on, while Freedom is stolen right from under us and a prison of control is constructed around us.  

It’s somewhat more difficult to realize that much of “the news” is the same.  Much of the chaos created by people like Donald Trump, is the same.  The flurry of changes, the absurdity of statements and decisions, the arguing and name-calling and panels of talking-heads on TV, all of it keeps everybody either engaged in an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of craziness that moves too fast to focus sufficiently on anything long enough to take action, or they get sick of it and tune it all out.  “I don’t care about politics anyway. I just want peace of mind.”

Soma.

* * * * *

The now-older adults like the Gen Xers or the Boomers, are no better than the Millennials or Gen Alphas or whoever else we want to distinguish ourselves from.  Sure, it’s easy to roll your eyes at the “skibidi toilet” humour of today’s young people; it’s intentionally idiotic, random brain-rot.  Or at least much of it is.  So the people who aren’t in that generation look at it and think “what is the world coming to?” 

As though the Boomers and Gen X did any better.  As though the world didn’t fall increasingly into the hands of the Military-Industrial Complex while “we” were at the helm.  As though climate change wasn’t mostly ignored for 50 years.  As though genocides stopped. As though the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of very few people and companies didn’t happen under our watch.

Sure, we think skibidi toilet is dumb.  They think minion-memes are dumb, and the 1970s-80s comic routines which were constant jokes about how annoying and stupid wives were to their husbands, were dumb, and the soap operas of the prior generations, and 90s talk shows showcasing dysfunctional people yelling at each other on a stage, were dumb.  I have no idea how many hours I spent watching The Price is Right.  But it’s more than I spent reading Noam Chomsky.  And how many people have read Chomsky AT ALL????  

Maybe Gen Xers think kids spend too much time on Minecraft or whatever, but we spent countless hours shooting Asteroids from a triangle on a screen, or gobbling dots in a maze while animated-ghosts chased us, or climbing platforms and ladders while a gorilla threw barrels at us.

Everybody thinks that whatever culture they don’t understand, is kind of dumb, weird, or a waste of time.  Personally, I think watching sports is a waste of time.  It certainly doesn’t make YOU any more athletic.  And rooting for “the local team?”  You’re watching millionaires, most of whom have no actual, local roots to the city whose name is on their team, playing a game against other millionaires who also have no connection to the local area of “their” team.  Really, what does it matter if the Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup?  What connection to Toronto do most of those people actually have?  Did you grow up with them?  Are they “the local boys?”  Why does it matter if they win, or lose, or Tampa Bay does, or Los Angeles, or literally any other team, which for the most part is the same — wealthy athletes who grew up somewhere else, and as soon as their contract expires or they get traded, will live somewhere else?

Not to unfairly knock watching sports.  It’s fun!  To me personally, it’s kind of dumb. But to other people, it’s one of the central parts of their lives. And you know, that’s fine. I love the dumb shit that I love. People maybe think it’s dumb to imagine being a sword-wielding Elf or a Sorceress, saving the world from a despotic, evil Demon King, while in reality, you’re just sitting around a table rolling dice and writing shit down on pieces of paper. People might think it’s dumb to spend countless hours, for years, looking at a little board with 64 black and white squares to try and figure out how to checkmate your opponent. People might think it’s dumb to [insert almost every single hobby here]. And who cares? What is life about, anyway, than loving the dumb shit that we love?

So love your Maple Leafs. Love your Dungeons and Dragons. Love your chess games and other equally useless shit. It’s a huge part of what makes life enjoyable and awesome.

And some people laugh at skibidi toilet and use that whole genre of humour to connect with their friends, develop their own secret meme-language and references, and feel like their generation is awesome. Whatever, man.

But the point is, we cannot let “soma” take us so far away from Reality, that we become complacent as everything falls apart. And we cannot let our minds be dominated by “news” about 5 guys in a submarine or whatever-the-fuck the media-moguls are okay with us seeing, knowing that it’ll keep us entertained and complacent.

Because a lot of the things we love are dying around us, and kids’ hopes for their futures are being crushed, and yes, fascists are trying to take over the world and imprison all of us in a system of control that feeds ever-more-wealth into their already disgustingly full pockets.

So what if we took our sports watching, Stardew Valley playing, social media scrolling, whatever-else-we-like-doing-that-is-basically-just-dumb-shit time, and subtracted like….10% 20%? And gave that time to Revolution? To volunteering for a power-confronting, hierarchy-challenging, community-building organization? Or to learning, to reading someone like Chomsky or Naomi Klein or [insert favourite change-making-intellectual here]? Or did something else that DIRECTLY made a difference, strengthened our minds, fed our understanding, built our networks of support and resistance? Imagine the difference! We’d still have our hockey teams and video games and meme culture. But we would also have a growing citizens’ revolution.

And your life? Might just be that much more of an adventure….

* * * * *

It’s fun to have fun.

But it’s better to have a livable world, full of thriving species, thriving communities of friends, vibrant arts and sports that we are actually involved in, with spaces we can go that don’t cost money, and water we can drink that isn’t full of micro-plastics, and food that doesn’t require poison to grow on giant industrial farms. 

Instead of “the news” being how everything is going down the toilet, this could be a world of Life, Song, Creativity, Joy, Community, Forests, Active Lifestyles, the Arts, Beauty.  THAT allows us to be free, to live in safety, and ultimately, if FUN is what we want out of life, then revolting against this system of Predatory Capitalism, as not-fun as that’s going to be, leads to a future in which everyone can live with far more of what they most deeply want.

We have to get off of soma.  We have to feel the despair, rage, heartache, tragedy, injustice and all the other shitty things that are staring us in the face.  And that have been our whole lives.  We have to.  Or we will never change them and live anywhere near to our potential.

Fuck going to Mars.  Let’s fix where we live first.  Which STARTS by getting off soma, and finally, after all these generations of subtly being controlled, we need to throw off our collective mental shackles, confront the power hierarchy en masse, and tap into the collective Goodness and Genius of humankind, to make things better.  Not for the 1%.  For the rest of us.

Besides, I’m sure we’ll have even more to laugh about then.  And who knows?  Maybe we’ll even bridge the generation and culture gaps that currently are chasms between us all.  

We could trade soma, for joy.